Japan: Food Safety

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Katie Fehrenbacher on Japan’s interesting cell phone accessible food safety database:

hey?ve already got a functioning beef tracking and data system?by which the consumer can locate their steak?s species, sex, stats, place-of-birth, farmer in charge, and location of the farm, all from a ID number on the?beef packaging?via any Internet connection.?Now the fish business is the?next food item to get the treatment and DoCoMo Sentsu (subsidiary of NTTDoCoMo) partnered with the Marine Fishery Systems Association to create a 2D barcode tracking system for all fish

Hollywoods Tax on ALL of us

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Wisconsin Public Radio’s Home page tells the story:

NOTICE: Due to rights issues, the Ideas Network internet streaming service cannot carry the BBC and CBC programming from 11:30pm to 6am weekdays and 12am to 6am on weekends until the conclusion of the Olympics on September 1st. Our live streaming for the Ideas Network will be off the air during these periods.

This absurdity, due to NBC’s broadcast rights deal with the IOC (International Olympic Committee), is yet another example of how the media has had its way with our politicians.

Enlightened New Mexico – Free Courthouse WiFi

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New Mexico’s Bernalillo County once again sets a great example for Dane County: Free WiFi (Wireless internet access) throughouth the 10-story courthouse. The WiFi network is intended to reduce juror frustration with waiting to be called for cases and to provide fast internet access for lawyers and judges as well. VOIP (Voice over internet protocol, or internet phone calls will also be supported on this wireless network).
North Carolina plans to install WiFi in all 100 of its courthouses. New York has similar plans.
Albuquerque provides free airport WiFi – while Dane county plans to eventually offer fee based WiFi access at MSN. This is a great example of our political leaders failing to embrace important new technologies that benefit everyone. Wisconsin needs pervasive true highspeed internet access. I’ve written extensively on this problem here and here.

The New Caesars – Gary Hart Opinion via Salon

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The cause of imperialism, weakened for a time by the fall of the European and Soviet empires, has found new advocates. The fact that the 21st century imperial power happens to be the United States of America, whose independence from colonialism was declared 228 years ago, seems not to matter. The neoconservatives’ project to position the United States as the world’s dominant power — and to use that power to govern in venues chosen seemingly by them alone, and collectively where reasonably easy but unilaterally where necessary — has been advanced and saluted.

Is Globalization Changing How We Eat?

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Tyler Cowen’s interesting talk before the Institute of Culinary Professionals:

If you look at Mexican food in this country, a lot of it, of course, is not eaten by Mexicans at all. It is eaten by Americans. But consider the Mexican food eaten by Mexicans. Well, who are the Mexicans, for the most part, who are currently coming to America? They tend to be fairly young, and they tend to be male. So take a group of young men, say ages eighteen to twenty-five, put them together in large numbers and let them eat. What do you get? Well, some of it is quite excellent, some of it is not so great, but you get something very different than the native cuisine. Let’s say you performed this thought experiment with France. Take a million Frenchmen, male, ages eighteen to twenty five, bring them to the United States, let them loose, have them eat. You are not going to get classic French cuisine.

Via Marginal Revolution.

Campus Reactors

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Matthew Wald on the UW’s “little” nuclear reactor:

The University of Wisconsin’s nuclear reactor is an unassuming little model, operated (on Tuesdays and Thursdays only) by students in T-shirts and shorts. In the last few months it has been used to identify the source of pottery shards from an ancient settlement in India, to test whether heart stents work better if they have been irradiated, and to study the water and gas balance that would be present in a future generation of power reactors.
But its fuel is weapons-grade uranium. If it were stolen, experts say, it could give terrorists or criminals a major head start on an atomic bomb.
And Wisconsin is not alone. Five other university research reactors around the country use weapons-grade fuel, even though the federal government has promised for more than two decades to reclaim their uranium and substitute a less enriched variety that is closer to the kind that commercial power plants use.